Tell me a story

Family storytelling offers many of the same advantages as book reading - and some new ones - for children's language and emotional development, coping skills, and sense of belonging. Tell Me a Story: Sharing Stories to Enrich Your Child's World shows parents how telling and sharing stories about family experiences can help children grow into healthy, happy adolescents and adults. Dr. Elaine Reese outlines the techniques that work best with children of all ages, from toddlers to teens, including children with learning delays and difficult temperaments. She also tackles challenging issues such as whether children profit at all from the stories that they experience through TV, movies, and video games; how storytelling differs from daughters to sons; and the best ways to continue to share family stories with children after a separation or divorce. Finally, Reese shares tips specially designed for storytelling with grandchildren, demonstrating how parents can and should continue to nurture family storytelling long after their children are grown, and especially once their children become parents themselves. Providing guidance on a positive, portable, and free way to enrich children's development, Tell Me a Story deserves a place in every parent's library.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.